Tuesday, August 25, 2015

"You
can't make this sh*t up," says one reader about the following story.

Last year,
Tasty reported
that SEIU decided to plow millions of dollars into a Silicon Valley-styled "business
incubator" as part of SEIU’s "innovative strategy" to "revitalize"
the labor movement by, uhh, adopting more capitalist money-making schemes into SEIU’s
operations.

So long, class struggle.

Hello, google capitalism.

SEIU's "business
incubator"-- which is modeled after venture capital firms -- is up and
running in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It's called "The Workers Lab"
and is headed by President David
Rolf (also the president of SEIU
Local 775) and CEO Carmen Rojas.

So what's
SEIU’s Workers Lab actually doing?

SEIU's David "Google" Rolf

According to
an
article published earlier this month by "BuzzFeed," the Workers
Lab is buzzing with discussion of "smart phone apps," maximizing revenue streams,
profit making, "monetizing" the membership, and using members for
"data mining," among other topics.

For example,
the center’s staff is excitedly discussing how unions and other organizations can "monetize"
their members by using apps to "mine" and then sell a variety of
personal data captured from workers.

The article notes that "low-income to
middle-class workers are… a demographic that plenty of outside groups with deep
pockets, especially in politics, are looking to learn more about…"

Tasty won’t be
surprised when SEIU President Emeritus Andy
Stern and his billionaire
buddy, Ron Perelman, make their
appearance at "The Workers Lab" sometime soon.

Ben Geyerhahn, the CEO of BeneStream
-- which is one of Any Stern's for-profit ventures -- currently serves on the Workers Lab's board
of directors along with SEIU President Mary
Kay Henry.

Here are
some excerpts from the BuzzFeed article. The full
text is available here.

The Workers
Lab wants to train labor organizers in the language of Silicon Valley, and
outfit them with the dark arts of business school, in hopes of reinvigorating
what is widely seen as a dying labor movement…

It’s the
last day of The Workers Lab summer institute, a two-day workshop for aspiring
entrepreneurs looking to turn their big ideas for empowering workers into
sustainable businesses. Though Workers Lab CEO Carmen Rojas and president David
Rolf are both present, the man of the hour is clearly Stanford Business School
lecturer Michael Bush. Bush has been called in as a consultant to walk the five
participating projects through his nine building blocks of revenue-generation.
He wears a gold watch on one wrist and a gold bracelet on the other… He says he
always starts the class with the same announcement: “I’m going to talk about
money.”

The Workers
Lab receives funding from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation,
but at heart, it’s a project of the Service Employees International Union.
David Rolf is president of both the lab and the SEIU’s Local 775 in Seattle,
the project’s major financial backer. Rolf has been public about his lack of
faith in traditional organized labor’s ability to defend the American workforce
going forward into the 21st century. He says he’s committed to finding a better
solution.

A big part
of that commitment is The Workers Lab, an experimental, five-person
organization studying whether the principles of capitalism and the structures
of startup culture might produce better outcomes for workers today…

"Are you
going to be for-profit?” Bush asks Chelsea Sprayregen, one-third of the
founding team of a child care project that came in named “Work Hard, Play Hard”
and left as “Provide.” After a second’s hesitation, she replies in the
affirmative.

“Good,” Bush
said. “I like that." ...

“We need to
teach people that empowerment and power are actually different,” [SEIU’s David]
Rolf explains. Empowering workers, [CEO Carmen] Rojas says later, means giving
them a voice, or advocating for improved conditions. Power, on the other hand,
means collective action or access to capital. If that means adopting the
tactics of the opposition — from dark money funds to data mining — so be it.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Here's a
third excerpt
from an internal conference call conducted by the California Hospital Association (CHA) in June of 2015 regarding its
secret
partnership deal with SEIU-UHW.

In this excerpt,
Duane Dauner (the CHA’s CEO) tells
hospital executives that serious problems are brewing inside his newlywed
relationship with SEIU-UHW, forged last year with Dave Regan.

In fact, the
problems are so severe they threaten to blow up the entire deal and ignite what
Dauner calls a "nuclear war."

What's going
on?

First, Dauner
says SEIU-UHW will not be successful
in delivering the billions of taxpayer dollars required by the deal in
order for SEIU-UHW to secure "organizing rights" covering 30,000
hospital workers in 2017.

In the deal, Regan pledged to use SEIU's political
influence and $20 million of workers' dues dollars to deliver up to $6 billion a year in new Medicaid ("Medi-Cal") revenues to
California hospital corporations by the end of 2016.

According to
Dauner, Regan will fail.

Secondly, SEIU-UHW
is apparently aware of its impending failure and is once again threatening to use
ballot initiatives to pressure the hospital industry to allow it to unionize
tens of thousands of hospital workers.

According to Dauner, SEIU-UHW may launch
a third round of ballot initiatives as soon as the fall of 2015.

If so, says
Dauner, SEIU-UHW will trigger a "nuclear war" that will "blow
up" its relationship with the CHA. Dauner says the industry will go
"all out" to defeat a new round of SEIU-UHW ballot initiatives.

Here's what Dauner
says (you can hear the following statement at the 15:35 minute mark in the video
below):

"UHW has threatened to introduce
initiatives for 2016 by filing them in 2015 with the Attorney General for title
and summary… We will be engaged in a nuclear war and we will be prepared. And
we will go ‘all out’ to defeat those initiatives." (15:35)

Thirdly,
Dauner reveals that the hospital industry is already maneuvering behind the
scenes to mount legal challenges against SEIU-UHW. He mentions one lawsuit
that's already underway and says California law prohibits Regan from using the
state's ballot initiative system to extract demands from the hospital industry.

Fourthly,
Dauner reveals that hospital workers are, at best, an invisible footnote in
SEIU-UHW's top-down deal with hospital bosses. For example, SEIU-UHW's deal
gives hospital CEOs -- not workers -- the right to choose which workers can actually
form unions, according to Dauner. In another aspect of the deal, Regan agreed to a "gag clause" that blocks workers from reporting patient-care violations to government oversight agencies.

It’s no
great surprise that the wheels are coming off Regan's so-called "audacious
new proposal to save the labor movement." Regan's scheme violates every
value of the labor movement and requires workers and their union, SEIU-UHW, to become errand boys for
profit-hungry hospital corporations.

Furthermore,
it's clear as day that Regan was out-maneuvered by the CHA during the
negotiation of the partnership deal. Regan -- and
SEIU-UHW's members -- are now stuck with a horrible deal that’s forced
SEIU-UHW members to cough up tens of millions of dollars to hospital corporations, has
failed to produce a single new union member for SEIU-UHW, and appears headed
towards a nuclear conflagration.

Don't be surprised when Regan signs onto an even bigger sellout deal with industry bosses in a desperate attempt to dig his ass out of a hole that's growing deeper by the day.

Here's the audio file, along with PowerPoint slides that the CHA presented to hospital executives during the presentation:

Monday, August 17, 2015

Last week, a
unit of 880 government workers in Fresno County, Calif. voted to decertify SEIU Local 521 by a vote of 319-228,
according to the Fresno Bee.

The county employees -- who include corrections officers, child support
officers, program technicians, and security guards -- voted to leave SEIU and join
a new union called "Fresno County
Public Safety Association."

According to
the newspaper, a second unit of approximately 500 benefit eligibility workers,
social workers, and job specialists also wants to decertify SEIU.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

A source has
sent a second excerpt
from an internal conference call held recently by the California Hospital Association regarding its secret
deal with SEIU-UHW, which is the
subject of a
complaint submitted to California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The new
recording is quite revealing.

We hear a
description -- direct from top execs inside the hospital industry's Chamber of
Commerce -- of the basic terms of the secret deal between hospital CEOs and SEIU-UHW’s
Dave Regan.

According to
the recording, the SEIU-CHA deal is basically a 'money-for-workers' transaction.

SEIU-UHW must
deliver $4.4 billion a year in new taxpayer-funded Medicaid revenues to
California’s hospital corporations… which are already enjoying big profits. (Last
week, Kaiser Permanente reported $2 billion
in profits during the first six months of 2015.)

And in
return for delivering this enormous sum to the bosses ($4.4 billion), SEIU-UHW can
basically purchase the right to unionize tens of thousands of California
hospital workers. The workers would then be subject to stripped-down wages and
benefits, a gag clause, and limited workplace rights.

(Note: In
California, Medicaid is referred to as "Medi-Cal.")

The
recording below also offers hints about the apparent troubles brewing between
the CHA and SEIU-UHW. Note: The beginning of the video is silent while background information is presented to viewers. The audio begins at 45 seconds.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Here's a
breaking story that leaves a tragic and disgraceful stain on Dave Regan's name.

Readers may
recall that in December, SEIU-UHW’s
Dave Regan shamelessly
pimped for Kaiser Permanente by
pairing up with Kaiser’s top executives, including John
Nelson, to deny a variety of well-documented problems affecting
thousands of Kaiser’s mental health patients.

Regan famously
toldModern Healthcare that Kaiser's
mental health staffing violations had been "completely solved." (Of
course, Regan forgot to tell the journalist he has no clue about these
issues because his union doesn't represent Kaiser’s mental health clinicians.)

Regan’s denials
came just three months after Kaiser paid a $4
million fine for "systematically" understaffing its mental health
clinics, falsifying patients' appointment records, and forcing patients to wait
weeks and months for the treatment of depression, bipolar disorder,
schizophrenia, anxiety, and other conditions.

Fast forward
to last weekend.

On Saturday,
a California newspaper reported the latest suicide of a patient experiencing
lengthy appointment delays at Kaiser. The victim was a former member of Regan's own union,
SEIU-UHW. She spent 16 years working in the Medical Records Department at a Kaiser South San Francisco Medical Center.

In case that’s
not enough, the suicide victim's last name offers a not-so-settle reminder of Dave Regan's shameful denials of mental health patients' struggles to get care at Kaiser. Her last name is "Ragan" -- pronounced identically to
"Regan."

According to
the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Barbara
Ragan struggled for years with depression and recently sought care from
Kaiser's ER after her depression grew worse. On a recent Sunday morning -- in
the middle of her two-month wait for a Kaiser psychiatry appointment -- Ms. Ragan drove herself to Kaiser Santa Rosa
Medical Center, drove to the top of the Kaiser parking structure, and with her
Kaiser card in her hand, jumped to her death.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat quotes her
husband as saying the following:

“She drove right over to Kaiser … 16 years
working there … she was very upset about them. She went right up to the parking
area near the emergency room,” he said. “To me, that’s a statement of what
they’re doing out there, how they treat people.”

A member of Sonoma
County's Board of Supervisors -- whose own husband committed suicide while
waiting 42 days for a Kaiser appointment to treat his depression -- also
criticized Kaiser and contradicted Regan's shameful statements. According to the article:

“Clearly that was not Barbara Ragan’s
experience,” Zane said. “She didn’t get what she was seeking; neither did her
husband or her children.”

Zane has publicly stated that Kaiser’s lack
of mental health services played a role in her husband’s 2011 suicide. She said
the HMO’s ongoing problems with access to therapists continue to endanger the
lives of those suffering severe mental health issues.

"How many more wake-up calls do they need?”
she said. “They have completely and utterly made these public statements that
they have improved their services.”

Zane said Kaiser is “exactly where they were
two-and-a-half years ago” when the DMHC issued a scathing report criticizing
the health plan’s mental health services.

Saturday's article
also quotes NUHW’s Sal Rosselli:

“This tragic situation is the inevitable
cost of a system run by accountants rather than caregivers,” Rosselli said.
“How many people have to die before Kaiser listens to the clinicians they hired
to fix the problem?”

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